1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates to a method of selecting a region of interest in an image.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Methods are known for selecting a region of interest (ROI) in an image. For example, it may be desirable to identify a region corresponding to a human face, or to identify a region corresponding to sky in a landscape image.
An ROI may be manually identified by a user, for example by using a mouse to outline the region. However, it is often desirable to select this region automatically, for example to achieve improved speed or accuracy compared with manual selection by the user.
Methods are known for automatic region selection, for example face recognition algorithms which identify the presence and location of human faces, or color analysis algorithms which select a region corresponding to a given range of colors.
In order to produce a natural-looking result when applying different processing methods to different regions of an image, it is often necessary to identify the border of the ROI to a high degree of accuracy, for example within one pixel. Existing methods are often unable to achieve this level of precision.